Everyday Evil: Why Our World Is the Way It Is - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Monique Layton is the former Associate Director of the Centre for Distance Education (Criminology Programs) at Simon Fraser University and resides in Vancouver. She was raised in North Africa and educated in France and Britain. After moving to Canada, she obtained degrees in comparative literature (MA) and cultural anthropology (PhD).

Monique Layton is the former Associate Director of the Centre for Distance Education (Criminology Programs) at Simon Fraser University and resides in Vancouver. She was raised in North Africa and educated in France and Britain. After moving to Canada, she obtained degrees in comparative literature (MA) and cultural anthropology (PhD).

Monique Layton is the former Associate Director of the Centre for Distance Education (Criminology Programs) at Simon Fraser University and resides in Vancouver. She was raised in North Africa and educated in France and Britain. After moving to Canada, she obtained degrees in comparative literature (MA) and cultural anthropology (PhD)

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“… from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different”

Instead of the epic, alien force of our imagination, anthropologist Monique Layton argues that evil is intrinsic to our humanity, constantly evolving with modern notions of morality.

Much of the world’s suffering, she argues, can be traced back to the individual actions of ordinary people trying—and failing—to maintain a static social order.

Drawing on anthropology, history, philosophy and popular culture, Layton provides a new lens through which to view contemporary issues, establishing connections between such disparate phenomena as:

• medieval law enforcement and the Trump Baby balloon
• the Salem witch trials and female genital mutilation
• body-snatching and surrogacy
• slavery and fast fashion

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Chapter One

ON HUMAN NATURE

A video recorded by a surveillance camera in 2015 was widely circulated on the internet—a scene in the Paris Metro, probably late at night, showing a man sleeping on a bench, very likely drunk. A young man appears on the screen, sits beside the sleeping man, pokes him a little to check on his alertness, steals something from his pocket and leaves. The drunk then half wakes up, stumbles around, and falls onto the tracks. The platform seems empty, save for a third man standing in the foreground, a passive witness to the drunk’s fall, who looks on for about three seconds, then turns around and walks away. A train pulls into the station and a few people gather, ready to board. Suddenly, the thief is seen running back to the scene. He jumps onto the tracks, pulls the drunk safely back and, assisted by the others, lifts him onto the platform.

Only one of these three men acted naturally as we might expect—the drunk, who confused and half-awake, goes too close to the edge of the platform and falls over the side. We see the thief, in the space of minutes, choose to do both evil and good; his moral compass elastic enough to plan petty theft and spontaneously rush into heroic rescue. The spectator’s role is more problematic. By doing nothing he had no effect on the situation, yet his inaction deeply offends our notion of what ‘good’ behaviour should be in such a case.

The video only lasts a couple of minutes, but the shock we experience in watching it is intense. In this wordless vignette, we see acts of good and evil, ambiguous intentions, responsibility and consequences, dangerous disruption and order restored, and, ultimately, the exercise of free will.

GOOD AND EVIL

Perhaps since the onset of reason, men and women have been perturbed by the complexity of their natures and their contradictory impulses. Philosophers have variously argued that the opposition of good and evil creates a form of harmony and continuity; that happiness can be found in the desire to do good; that there is in fact no moral rule by which mankind should be bound; that anyone is free to determine their own moral codes. Most believe humans prefer good over evil and encourage self-improvement. Basic philosophical positions range from seeing good and evil as either absolute and innate, or social and situational. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, believed that the perception of evil is consensually shared and, at the same time, individually intuitive:

The only immediate and universal sign available for recognizing Evil is that it is detestable. Not detestable to this one or that one, but to everyone, hence to the evildoer himself. I shall know unmistakably that an action is evil when the very idea that I might commit it horrifies me.^[1]

Mythology, religion, philosophy and literature have attempted to formulate both questions and answers concerning the impulses of good and evil that motivate our thoughts and actions. Anthropology, a comparatively new discipline with less didactic objectives, introduced another dichotomy—purity and pollution, that we may less specifically perceive as order and dissonance, where order refers to a congruent environment in which a particular culture thrives and dissonance to whatever disturbs the equilibrium to which that culture aspires. In this context, purity relates to wellness, while pollution implies danger.

Greeks philosophers provided the basis of our current thinking. The three most influential, Socrates, his student Aristotle and Plato—all saw a connection between good and happiness, evil and unhappiness. Socrates believed in man’s essential goodness and saw ignorance as the source of evil deeds—given the choice and the knowledge, man would rather do good. Plato thought that being able to distinguish between good and evil was innate and that good could win over evil through sermons and meditation, leading to a life of good behaviour and happiness. For Aristotle, whose influence extended well into the Middle Ages, reason was at the source of all behaviour, and happiness was to be found in harmony with nature. He believed good men were consistently good and bad men could change their ways.

A different view, also fundamental to Western thought, was espoused by the fourth-century theologian St. Augustine who believed that the ‘original sin’ of Adam and Eve (eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) was transmitted to all their descendants and that salvation could only come from the grace of God. In the myth of the Garden of Eden, we succumbed to the Serpent’s temptation and our innate quest for knowledge became our curse. But the question of motivation remains. Did we even know we were looking for something when we ate the forbidden fruit? Did we actually, as God accused us, want to “be as gods, knowing good and evil?” Or did Adam simply follow the lead of someone he trusted? And do we, who came after, deserve punishment—even the innocent newborn whose souls have not even had time to conceive of evil and sin? Some believe in a felix culpa, where the cruelty of being branded with original sin is far outweighed by the delights of an eventual redemption and the promise of resurrection. Others must find comfort elsewhere.

Religion, the theoretical fount of truth for its believers, actually roils the waters even further. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, considers what happened when polytheism gave way to monotheism. If there is a single God, the world should be an orderly place, all things obeying the same laws. How then does mankind accept the presence of wickedness, discord and the lack of order? If evil exists as separate from God, as dualism posits, then the world is governed by two opposing forces. But dualism has its own drawbacks. “While solving the Problem of Evil, it is unnerved by the Problem of Order…If Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war?” He concludes, “Monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order.” Man, he says, is also burdened with the possibility of free will. If it really exists, man is then allowed to choose evil—the choice is real and the option valid.

On the eve of the Renaissance, medieval thinkers started looking at evil in a new way, reducing it to worldly temptation and equating good with spirituality. Johan Huizinga the great twentieth-century medievalist historian, described this shift: “In the Middle Ages, the choice lay, in principle, between God and the world, between contempt and eager acceptance, at the peril of one’s soul, of all that makes up the beauty and the charm of earthly life. All terrestrial beauty bore the stain of sin.”^[2]

Soon the seductions of the world and the temptation of evil were differentiated again. Between the Renaissance and the culmination of the Age of Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century, a...